True Story: A Beijing Office Worker Living in a Slide-in Camper — Freedom Is Where I Am

Tags: Slide-in Camper, Camper Van Life, True Sharing, Camper Van Configuration, Daily Camper Life

I live in a slide-in camper in Beijing; I can travel as soon as I get off work

This is a story about pursuit.

More precisely, the protagonist Siri has found a gap for nature amid the orderly urban life.

At the beginning of the story, Siri’s life was split between a 20-story office building and a rental house outside the Fifth Ring Road. The former was busy, fast-paced, and left no time for reflection. The latter was relatively stagnant and silent; the time after work seemed to be swallowed up by the building, vanishing without a trace.

Then she realized she needed more space — for fields and streams, moonlight and breeze, and for herself. So she moved her home into a slide-in camper, cutting her commute from two hours to five minutes. The scenery outside her window changed from layers of tall buildings to a vast starry sky. On weekends, she even drives to the suburbs to sell coffee and interact with strangers.

Life in the slide-in camper is not entirely perfect. Items jostling with bumps, lingering cooking fumes, and bugs in the wild often break the idealized picture. But there are many moments when Siri feels this is the life she has always dreamed of.

What follows is her story:

I

The Dream Life

My name is Siri, an ordinary IT white-collar worker in Beijing.

In early April last year, I accidentally came across a video: a handsome guy drove his modified slide-in camper to sell coffee in the mountains on the outskirts of Beijing. He parked the car in a peach blossom forest, made coffee at the operating table at the rear, with several customers waiting nearby, and some people sunbathing and chatting on chairs under the trees not far away.

I was struck by that leisurely and peaceful scene, and I wanted to live such a life too.

At first, I only thought about modifying a car to sell coffee on weekends. But as I learned more about slide-in campers, I thought: why can’t I live in a slide-in camper? Park it next to the company on weekdays, and go out to sell coffee on weekends — how free it would be.

Two months later, I chose a slide-in camper and paid a deposit. I picked up the car three months later.

A few days before the Mid-Autumn Festival last year, my slide-in camper arrived in Beijing smoothly. It’s yellow, and I named it "Big Yellow". From then on, I would live with it.

I was thrilled when I first got the car. Sometimes I suddenly drove the slide-in camper to the wild to sleep. I once found an open space next to Shougang, parked the car in a parking lot on the mountainside, where I could just overlook the bright lights of the city — it was stunning.

When I woke up the next morning and pushed open the door, fresh air rushed in. Around my slide-in camper, there was even a flock of sheep grazing. The sheep were obviously not afraid of people at all. When they saw me, they seemed to freeze for a moment, stopped chewing and stared at me for a while, then went back to munching happily. Before that, I never imagined I could meet sheep on the outskirts of Beijing.

After moving into the slide-in camper, what I hesitated about every weekend changed from "whether to go out" to "where to go this week". During the Qingming Festival this year, I even went camping with friends by car. We found a hidden flat ground in the middle of a hill, with a small stream below. We parked the car, set up the tent, and turned on all the car lights. It was completely dark by then, and it felt like we were the only people in the whole mountain — quiet and beautiful.

Another thing I longed for was selling coffee in the suburbs on weekends.

I specially signed up for a barista training course to learn everything from coffee bean varieties, planting and picking to roasting and extraction. I found making a cup of coffee is really not easy.

Then came constant practice. I didn’t schedule my time tightly. Usually, I drove to the suburbs on Friday nights, finished eating and drinking the next morning, and opened for business at eleven or twelve o’clock. I found a place with a nice view, put up a sign and a QR code, and customers came one after another. Two thirty in the afternoon was the busiest time — tourists were basically going down the mountain and felt a bit thirsty, so they would come to buy coffee.

At first, I sold coffee alone, then my cousin came to help me. He is an excellent insurance broker and said my coffee consumer group highly overlapped with his target audience. I just needed a little helper, so we worked together.

II

Living in a Slide-in Camper

I have lived in the slide-in camper for half a year from last October to now. Life is very different from living in a rental house. Since I want to live here for a long time, I have to carefully consider the car model, layout and configuration.

The car model determines the space size. I finally chose a single-side expandable model. When all the expansion mechanisms are open, it feels quite spacious.

Water and electricity are the basics of life. My slide-in camper is a high-configured one with "plenty of water and electricity". It has a 300-liter clean water storage capacity and a full 14 kWh of electricity. It’s enough for several days even if used freely, but I soon got used to saving: I let the tap run slowly, and turn off the inverter immediately after using electrical appliances. When I lived at home before, my mom always complained that I wasted water and electricity — "leaving the tap running loudly" and "keeping the lights on everywhere". The bad habits that her nagging couldn’t change were fixed by the slide-in camper.

The household appliances in the slide-in camper are specially made to adapt to the bumpy on-board environment.

My refrigerator is a double-door 152-liter one. To save electricity, I try not to store too much food in it, which also cured my habit of hoarding frozen food. Anyway, life is convenient near the parking lot with various restaurants, and Hema Fresh can deliver to the slide-in camper door, so there’s no need to hoard goods.

There is also a 3kg drum washing machine in the car. 3kg is about two shirts, two skirts or pants, plus some small clothes. When I need to wash large clothes, I go to my friend’s house to use a big washing machine.

For cooking, the slide-in camper has a microwave oven, a special electromagnetic stove, plus a small food processor and an electric frying pan I bought separately. It’s very convenient to cook simple meals — I even cooked steamed pork with rice flour, a hearty dish, in the car.

Many people can hardly imagine how to take a bath and go to the toilet in a slide-in camper.

In fact, the bathroom is fully equipped with a flush toilet, a shower head, a ventilation fan and so on. The electric water heater has a capacity of 20 liters and can heat the water up to 70 degrees Celsius. I can take a comfortable bath when it’s not cold, but I have to hurry up in winter.

It’s worth mentioning that the on-board toilet is rotatable. When taking a bath, turn it against the wall to get more space. Turn it back when using it, so my legs can rest comfortably. But the black water tank must be cleaned regularly, about once a week. It’s like a trolley suitcase and needs to be dragged to the bathroom for disposal. Every time I walk down the road pulling it, I always attract curious glances from passers-by.

My favorite place is the sleeping area. My bed is above the cab, and I need a small ladder to climb up. It’s very wide with a large skylight above, so I can lie down and look at the sky. The satisfaction brought by the scenery completely makes up for all its problems, such as not being able to sit up straight in bed and poor heat preservation.

The most comfortable moment is lying in bed with a soft quilt on a rainy night, listening to the rain hitting the skylight — it’s so pleasant that I don’t want to fall asleep. But when I try to stay awake a little longer to listen more, I fall asleep quickly. It’s really a cure for insomnia.

Late at night, I climbed up to the cab bed to sleep. I opened the skylight and let the moonlight spill all over my quilt. At that moment, I felt this is the life I have always dreamed of.